Collections

The European Union's 2030 Biodiversity Strategy aims to place species and ecosystems on the recovery path by 2030, preserving and restoring Europe's natural capital, and positioning Europe at the forefront of global biodiversity conservation efforts. These commitments urgently respond to the decline of species and the deterioration of nature. A key component of this Strategy is the development of a Trans-European Nature Network (TEN-N) that protects ecosystems and their contributions to people against threats from climate change and unsustainable land use. The TEN-N is expected to increase the resilience of natural ecosystems, supported by the existing Natura 2000 Network and other nationally designated protected areas. New designations are expected to contribute to achieving protected land, including inland waters, comprising 30% of the territory, increasing the network's ecological representativeness, and incorporating novel strictly protected and ecological connectivity areas. Implementing the TEN-N faces major challenges in defining criteria and planning tools to maximize the network's representativeness and connectivity at the European level.

The TEN-N should create a functionally connected system, assimilating biodiversity conservation goals with nature-based solutions for societal needs, such as green and blue infrastructure. In the face of global change, the Network should also ensure that species communities can adapt, providing sufficient and connected spaces for nature. Achieving these goals requires innovative planning approaches, integrating models of biodiversity and ecosystem change with conservation prioritization tools and participatory processes. The TEN-N must be based on SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound) conservation and management objectives and monitoring methods.

NaturaConnect aims to support the development of the TEN-N through transdisciplinary research. Participatory processes are central to its activities, involving stakeholder engagement at regional, national, and international levels. Predictive biodiversity and ecosystem service models form the backbone for analyzing protected area representativeness and connectivity, taking into account multiple prioritization criteria and the diverse perspectives and needs of nature conservation. NaturaConnect seeks to develop data, analytical tools, and knowledge to support solutions —namely, the blueprint for TEN-N configurations. It also analyses best practices for governance of area-based conservation measures and potential funding mechanisms to provide the European Commission and Member States with a comprehensive set of planning and implementation support tools.

Only publications directly resulting from the NaturaConnect project are accepted in this collection.

The European Union's 2030 Biodiversity Strategy aims to place species and ecosystems on the recovery path by 2030, preserving and restoring Europe's natural capital, and positioning Europe at the forefront of global biodiversity conservation efforts. These commitments urgently respond to the decline ...

The mission of the Earth Metabolome Initiative is to reveal and safeguard the life-sustaining chemistry of all known species on Earth, map its patterns and functions, and make this knowledge open.

The largely unexplored metabolic diversity of life on Earth, which orchestrates living systems and supports human health and nutrition, is disappearing rapidly as species go extinct. The Earth Metabolome Initiative aims to launch an unprecedented collaborative global sampling and digitization effort to reveal and preserve this vital natural resource. We will develop resources and technologies to accelerate global metabolome discovery for the benefit of human societies and protection of biodiversity. We will make our findings open, accessible and interoperable within an electronic resource that will connect metabolites with their roles in living systems, functional networks and importance for human societies. This will constitute an Earth Metabolome Knowledge Base for sustainable innovations now and in future. We will thus achieve the following scientific, societal and environmental aims:

1. Advance life sciences by systematically expanding knowledge on global chemodiversity and placing it in the context of biosphere processes and functions.

2. Benefit human society through the development of novel, sustainable solutions in agriculture, medicine and other fields. 3. Protect biodiversity by providing critical information for monitoring, developing novel metrics, and informing predictive tools to prioritize protection and incentivising conservation.

The Digital Botanical Gardens Initiative (https://www.dbgi.org/) has been designed as a pilot for the EMI. 

This is the RIO topical collection gathering the research outcomes of the Earth Metabolome Initiative, feel free to propose your ideas and contribute!

The mission of the Earth Metabolome Initiative is to reveal and safeguard the life-sustaining chemistry of all known species on Earth, map its patterns and functions, and make this knowledge open.

The largely unexplored metabolic diversity of life on Earth, which orchestrates living systems and s ...

The European Union has established the European Science Open Cloud (EOSC), as the “system of systems” Infrastructure where scientists, stakeholders and other types of users can find data, analytical web services, publications, networks and other research resources to carry out their work.

The ESFRI Research Infrastructures form five thematic Science Clusters within the EOSC ecosystem: ENVRI FAIR on the Environment, EOSC Life for the Life and Biomedical Sciences, PANOSC for the Photon and Neutron, SSHOC for the Social Sciences and Humanities and ESCAPE for the Astronomy & Particle Physics. These Clusters are critical to the development of the EOSC integrated environment for the provision of the research resources, whose integration, composition and use by their communities will undoubtedly enhance the emerging EOSC infrastructure. They also provide examples of how shared projects, the Science Projects, can contribute to addressing major societal challenges for Europe and demonstrate how Research Infrastructures can align to support Horizon Europe's missions within EOSC.

This collection of articles highlights the major outputs of these EOSC Future Science Projects: their planning, implementation and the engagement of the relevant scientific community.

The European Union has established the European Science Open Cloud (EOSC), as the “system of systems” Infrastructure where scientists, stakeholders and other types of users can find data, analytical web services, publications, networks and other research resources to carry out their work.

The ESF ...

This collection hosts outcomes and products from the COST Action CA20125 ParAqua "Applications for zoosporic parasites in aquatic ecosystems".

The Action is funded by the EU (2021-2024) and aims to organise and coordinate an innovative and dynamic European network connecting academia, industry and water management authorities to advance and apply knowledge and expertise on zoosporic parasites (i.e. aquatic fungi and fungi-like microorganisms) and the relation with their hosts in natural and industrial systems.

Zoosporic parasites cause severe host mortality, the economic impacts of parasitic diseases are notable in microalgae biotech industry, affecting production of food ingredients, biofuels, pharma- and nutraceuticals. But zoosporic parasites also constitute important drivers of natural populations, potentially influencing aquatic food webs and community dynamics, including maintaining and promoting diversity.

Main aim and objective of the Action is to organise and coordinate an innovative and dynamic Network connecting academia, industries and water management authorities to advance and apply knowledge and expertise on zoosporic parasites and the relation with their hosts in natural ecosystems and industrial algal biotech production.

The collection includes a range of different outputs and products, including the Grant Proposal (MoU), the Data Management Plan, the Action dissemination products, reports, protocols, methodologies, and research papers.

This collection hosts outcomes and products from the COST Action CA20125 ParAqua "Applications for zoosporic parasites in aquatic ecosystems".

The Action is funded by the EU (2021-2024) and aims to organise and coordinate an innovative and dynamic European network connecting academia, industry an ...

Successful management, exchange and interpretation of an ever-growing tsunami of digital information and knowledge will depend on highly automated methods dealing with combined data. This will require artificial intelligence but also robust and informative ways to store and disseminate data and metadata. FAIR Digital Objects (FDOs) promise to provide the needed framework.

FAIR is about making data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable both for humans and machines. FAIR digital objects have shown key capabilities to simplify and scale the use of data across domains, increase trust in data and ease the handling of high volumes of information. Now widespread consensus and collaboration is needed.

The 1st International Conference of FAIR Digital Objects brings together for the first time, key technical, scientific, industry, and science-policy stakeholders at this scale with the aim to boost the development and implementation of FDOs worldwide.

This conference collection explores two of the most urgent themes in constructing the FDO framework: research in structuring the knowledge domain and how to facilitate practical work, and practice in the design and building of FDO-consistent infrastructures.

Successful management, exchange and interpretation of an ever-growing tsunami of digital information and knowledge will depend on highly automated methods dealing with combined data. This will require artificial intelligence but also robust and informative ways to store and disseminate data and meta ...

The BESTMAP RIO Collection will host key outputs relating to the new modelling framework the project is developing. The project’s work focuses on supporting EU policy design and monitoring, by addressing the complexity of decisions made by farmers and the wider impact of agricultural policy on natural, social and cultural assets in rural areas of Europe.

This Collection will continue to be developed further as the BESTMAP project continues to promote a sustainable future for the agriculture sector in Europe.

The BESTMAP RIO Collection will host key outputs relating to the new modelling framework the project is developing. The project’s work focuses on supporting EU policy design and monitoring, by addressing the complexity of decisions made by farmers and the wider impact of agricultural policy on natur ...

The ReNature RIO Collection will host key outputs relating to the sustainable use of biodiversity, biodiversity-ecosystem functioning, green infrastructure and ecosystem service assessments across rural-urban gradients, equitable access to the benefits derived from nature in cities and socio-environmental justice, payments for ecosystem services, and designing nature-based solutions. Reports from workshops attended by students, early career researchers and policymakers from all over the world will accumulate further empirical knowledge on the ReNature subjects. This Collection will continue to be developed further as the ReNature project continues to promote open innovation whilst effectively engaging communities in the co-development and exchange of knowledge for nature-based solutions implementation.

The ReNature RIO Collection will host key outputs relating to the sustainable use of biodiversity, biodiversity-ecosystem functioning, green infrastructure and ecosystem service assessments across rural-urban gradients, equitable access to the benefits derived from nature in cities and socio-environ ...

Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO Journal) invites submissions of research outcomes - especially early and brief results - relevant to the COVID-19 pandemic in light of the unprecedented health emergency and the scale of its worldwide impact on society, industry and economics.

By means of Open Science, we aim to contribute with real-time findings and data to the efforts of scientific teams, experts and other decision-makers across the globe, in order to minimise the damage and eventually bring the end to the current crisis, and even more importantly, prevent similar situations in the future. Published research ideas and brief results are also expected to bring up crucial discussion, thereby facilitating actions and collaborations in the fight against devastating health emergencies.

Especially encouraged are submissions focused on the long-term effects of COVID-19. Considered are publications across disciplines, including medicine, ethics, politics, economics etc. at a local, regional, national or international scale. Accepted publication types include: Research articles, Research Idea, Case Study, Clinical Case Study, Data Paper, Forum Paper, Methods, Questionnaire, R Package, Software Description, Workshop Report, Project Report, Research Poster, Research Presentation, Short Communication, Single-media Publication (e.g. infographics), Data Review.

We also encourage publication of research ‘bundles’, where conventional papers are published along with raw research outputs (e.g. data, case studies, presentations, etc.), to better contextualise the work and facilitate further contribution by other scientists.

Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO Journal) invites submissions of research outcomes - especially early and brief results - relevant to the COVID-19 pandemic in light of the unprecedented health emergency and the scale of its worldwide impact on society, industry and economics.

By means of Open Science ...